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In discussions with the White House over the executive order Trump is scheduled to sign on Tuesday, Scott Pruitt successfully argued against including language revoking the agency's 2009 “endangerment finding." | Getty

Pruitt takes fire from conservatives in climate showdown

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is coming under fire from conservatives amid a simmering behind-the-scenes fight over how far to take President Donald Trump's push to undo his predecessor's climate change agenda.

In discussions with the White House over the executive order Trump is scheduled to sign on Tuesday, Pruitt successfully argued against including language revoking the agency's 2009 “endangerment finding," according to two sources close to the issue.

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The endangerment finding declared that greenhouse gas emissions threaten human health and welfare and made EPA legally responsible for regulating carbon dioxide. It later set in motion much of former President Barack Obama's climate agenda. To many conservative skeptics of mainstream climate science, overturning the finding is an essential first step toward successfully undoing Obama administration climate regulations on everything from power plants to vehicles.

But Pruitt, with the backing of several White House aides, argued in closed-door meetings that the legal hurdles to overturning the finding were massive, and the administration would be setting itself up for a lengthy court battle.

A cadre of conservative climate skeptics are fuming about the decision — expressing their concern to Trump administration officials and arguing Pruitt is setting himself up to run for governor or the Senate. They hope the White House, perhaps senior adviser Stephen Bannon, will intervene and encourage the president to overturn the endangerment finding.

Trump administration officials have not totally ruled out eventually targeting the endangerment finding. Conservative groups have petitioned the EPA to look at reopening it, one source said, and the agency may eventually be compelled to respond to the petition. Axios first reported the news of the petition.

"Getting rid of the Clean Power Plan is just not enough," said Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the former leader of Trump’s EPA transition team.

Ebell warned that leaving the endangerment finding in place would compel the Trump administration to come up with a replacement approach to regulating emissions from power plants and other sources that might not be too dissimilar from Obama's Clean Power Plan.

"Before you know it you end up having to do a Trump Clean Power Plan," he said.

James Delingpole, a Breitbart News columnist, blasted Pruitt on Monday, arguing he is "more interested in building his political career than he is taking on the Green Blob, insiders report." Bannon ran Breitbart before joining the Trump campaign last summer.

Delingpole, who first reported that Pruitt advocated against reopening the endangerment finding, even suggested that the EPA administrator should resign.

"But what President Trump needs now more than ever are administrators with the political will to do the right thing — which is, after all, the reason so many Americans voted for him," he wrote. "If Scott Pruitt is not up to that task, then maybe it’s about time he did the decent thing and handed over the reins to someone who is."

EPA spokesman John Konkus did not directly address Pruitt's role in discussions over the endangerment finding, and said Tuesday’s order would focus on the carbon regulations for power plants. “This executive order is a victory for American jobs, and we think that speaks for itself," he said in a statement.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The conservative criticism of Pruitt a marks a major shift. Pruitt, a skeptic of mainstream climate science himself, was hailed by Republicans as a top-notch choice to lead the agency. “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact,” Pruitt said in a recent interview.

Reopening the endangerment finding is much easier said than done.

Any decision to revoke it would require a lengthy notice-and-comment rulemaking, which would lead to certain litigation brought by environmentalists and states like California and New York. To survive a court challenge, Trump officials would have to prove to a court that greenhouse gases no longer pose a danger — something most observers say would not fly before any judge given the depth of scientific evidence on climate change.

The fracas over the endangerment finding comes amid internal unrest at the EPA.

Pruitt has expressed frustration at the White House's slow pace in nominating deputies to help him carry out the president's agenda, according to a person close to him. The executive order Trump will sign on Tuesday will instruct EPA to begin rewriting Obama's climate regulations for power plants, a process that could be complicated by the agency's barebones staff of political appointees.

The EPA administrator is also facing a massive 31 percent cut to his agency's budget.

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Pruitt publicly raised concerns about the White House's initial proposed cuts, which amounted to about a 25 percent reduction, arguing for preserving funding for water grants and the brownfield program. Some White House officials were annoyed by Pruitt's comments, according to a person close to the matter. And the White House then slashed the EPA's budget even further.

Pruitt's first weeks on the job have been marred by personality clashes.

David Schnare, a member of the Trump administration's beachhead team at EPA, resigned from the agency earlier this month in frustration.

Schnare has publicly remained cryptic about his reasons for leaving, saying that the matter is "complex." But he said he was bothered by disloyalty to Trump among both political appointees and career employees at EPA. But Pruitt's allies say Schnare is a disgruntled ex-employee who is unfairly targeting them.

Meanwhile, EPA officials have expressed frustration at the presence of former Washington State Sen. Don Benton, the agency's White House-assigned senior adviser.

Benton has repeatedly butted heads with Ryan Jackson, Pruitt's chief of staff. Multiple sources speculated that Benton might soon leave the agency. And EPA is expected to bring in two new communications staffers, the sources said. The agency is eyeing J.P. Freire, a spokesman for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), as its new communications director and Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman at the American Chemistry Council, as its deputy communications director. Neither Freire nor Bowman responded to requests for comment.